Reviews for The Growing Economy

The average rating for The Growing Economy based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-25 00:00:00 Jeremy House An expert introduction to economics that blows the huge textbooks by Sloman and Mankiw into orbit if you are interested in really knowing what the subject is all about. For a non-English native, albeit one who has spent a fair bit of time living in Australia, Varoufakis has a superb turn of phrase and is in a small band of economists - Philip Mirowski, Deirdre McCloskey, Geoff Hodgson, Jason Potts are others - who can actually claim distinction as a writer. The book concentrates on theory and comes down heavily on the side of heterodox thinking - it's a swingeing attack on the falseness of neoclassical ideology and deserves a much wider audience.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-14 00:00:00 Daniel Myers Varoufakis set himself a very difficult task here, and his success is uneven. His goal is to provide an exposition and history of the basic concepts of neoclassical economics, and a criticism of them as well. For the most part, his exposition is excellent, and readers looking for an introductory critical perspective on neoclassical economics would do well to begin here (it is a bit more readable than Steve Keen's Debunking Economics, for example). However, the criticisms he provides, couched at the same level as the introduction, are too frequently "gotcha" jabs that would hardly withstand a serious response from neoclassicals. That's not to say there is nothing valuable here. The discussion and critique of welfare economics, in particular, is quite good. However, when it comes to marginal utility and production functions, Varoufakis' critique is quite shallow. Overall, a good introduction, but if you've already spent some time with critiques of economics, you may want to look elsewhere to broaden your foundation.